Scan PST results

[murgatroyd]

We have been using Outlook 2010 for three users (on Windows Server 2008 R2) for a couple of years with no problems, but when I used Outlook's manual archiving function the other day, it worked fine for one user with a PST file around 300 MB but kept crashing before it got half-way through for two users with larger PST files around 1 GB.

Someone advised me that Outlook is prone to issues from PST file corruption and suggested running ScanPST. I tried this on one of the larger files, and it reported and repaired errors. I repeated this until it reported no errors (after four runs).

I then opened Outlook, compacted the file, and closed Outlook without doing anything else. When I ran ScanPST immediately after that, it again reported and repaired errors, again needing several runs to clear them all! This appears to indicate that Outlook itself causes errors, or at least "inconsistencies", even without the user actually using it?!

I again ran ScanPST until it reported no errors, then ran the manual archiving function again immediately after that, but again it crashed before it got half-way through!

Is there anything else I can try to get the archiving function to complete without crashing, or can I just restart it after a crash and continue, or is there a good third-party repair and archiving utility that can do a better job than Outlook itself?

 

[murgatroyd]

I noticed that the crashes were always occurring when the archiving function was processing the Sent Items folder, so I tried archiving that folder manually (selected emails between archive dates, made a "Sent Items" folder in the archive file, and moved the emails to there) before archiving the rest automatically, and that worked around the problem.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Thanks for the update.
It sounds like one of the message was corrupt. The act of moving the messages allowed outlook to repair the problem.